A
Aral Balkan
aralbalkan.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
Aral Balkan, a designer and developer, writes about privacy, surveillance business models, and ethical technology.
What HN saysHN commenters cite his posts equating ad analytics with spyware, the Camera Panopticon, and the Ello VC funding story.
46HN people shared it
12linked it in comments
36stories submitted
1.1Kstory points
11 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1"Twitter Terrorists" - Big Tech Conf Co. Steals, Threatens, & Libels4 people · 2 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it.3 people · 63 points · first shared 2008 · 12 comments on HN
- 3Ello, goodbye3 people · 56 points · first shared 2014 · 11 comments on HN
- 4Codename Prometheus3 people · 7 points · first shared 2013 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Free Schnail Mail for life2 people · 266 points · first shared 2013 · 85 comments on HN
- 6Aral Balkan – The Camera Panopticon2 people · 3 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 7Spyware 2.02 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 8Why you should learn HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for mobile development2 people · 1 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 920672 people · first shared 2009
- 10So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish1 people · 191 points · first shared 2015 · 139 comments on HN
- 11Beware of geeks bearing gifts1 people · 152 points · first shared 2013 · 73 comments on HN
- 12How PayPal could have killed an independent conference1 people · 110 points · first shared 2011 · 65 comments on HN
- 13My Sys-Con Nightmare1 people · 108 points · first shared 2009 · 8 comments on HN
- 14SysCon attacks prominent blogger1 people · 23 points · first shared 2009 · 4 comments on HN
- 15Google and Yahoo’s Flash indexing is revealing… too much?1 people · 20 points · first shared 2008 · 3 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
FilterSweep · 2015-08-10
Along the same vein, I highly recommend this read from Aral Balkan[0] on how advertising and analytics data is now really just a fancy word for what we considered spyware back in the older (freer) days of the Internet.
[0]: https://aralbalkan.com/notes/spyware-2.0/
troethom · 2013-07-10
I agree with everyone that this should be open-source, but at least this has one benefit over the other proprietary solutions out there: This is not just a secure messenger, but also a beautiful one. If you want to convince - and I do - those who use Facebook Messenger and iMessage and don't necessarily consider their privacy, it needs to have a great user experience on top of the technical foundation. On the other hand, if it gets that and ends up being open-sourced, it would be a great fit for Aral Balkan's Codename Prometheus: http://aralbalkan.com/notes/codename-prometheus/
alexkay · 2008-10-17
The limitations are well known, just Google around. A relatively good overview can be found here:
http://aralbalkan.com/1504
It was discussed in this thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/8…
It definitely depends on the kind of app you are doing. From my experience GAE is great for websites with high ratio of reads to writes. If you have a lot of writes or any non-trivial background processing, it becomes harder to develop for appengine.
slasaus · 2015-02-13
I'm afraid this is the Silicon Valley way of doing business. I believe it's what you get when dealing with VCs. Read more about that here: https://aralbalkan.com/notes/the-camera-panopticon/
wildpeaks · 2014-09-30
Apparently it's VC money: https://aralbalkan.com/notes/ello-goodbye/
dceddia · 2014-09-30
In regards to selling your data, apparently they've taken at least a bit of venture capital, so it's probably a realistic worry in the future...
https://aralbalkan.com/notes/ello-goodbye/
mcantelon · 2010-05-10
Yeah, Sys-Con are a sketchy company.
http://aralbalkan.com/2022
ssp · 2009-12-30
The post he links to, http://aralbalkan.com/2508, is pretty good too.
astrodust · 2009-04-04
Isn't this sys-con.com site catching a lot of crap for rebranding content form other sites?
http://aralbalkan.com/2067
I can't find the original link for this post but I'm sure there is one.
mustpax · 2009-03-30
The actual article is here: http://aralbalkan.com/2067
The link just points to the root aralbalkan.com, which is the landing page.
villageidiot · 2008-12-23
What about the other 473 issues?
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list
Shouldn't we vote for them too?
Not that distributed transactions wouldn't be yummy but having worked on App Engine myself (as recently as yesterday in fact), I can say very confidently that they have much bigger fish to fry at the moment than distributed transactions. If people don't take my word on this, and why should they, please read Aral Balkan, who is one of the early victims/adopters:
"Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it."
http://aralbalkan.com/1504
limmeau · 2011-02-04
Sys-con as in http://aralbalkan.com/2022 ?